I like your ECW figures very much, but do wish there were pikemen, marching and standing, cast with open hands to take vertical wire pikes, like the figures in your League of Augsburg range. Ideally there would be figures in armour, and unarmoured, with a mixture of helmets, hats, Monmouth caps and monteros.
Does anyone else feel the same? If so, please join this topic!

Welcome Arthur, warning - we will insult you and derail your threads with monotonous regularity.

IanS 

Oooh! He starts with a hot topic!

The Open Hands debate rages quite regularly on this forum. You may invoke the ire of the sculptors.


Anyway, welcome to the Forum.

May I just ask, 1815? This would suggest a Napoleonic interest, or is a quarter past six significant? Stuff the ECW, have a look at the new Napoleonics!

Welcome to the forum arthur!

You will doubtless find it warm, welcoming and wacky , by turns

I hope you enjoy your time here.

As to open hands for pikes, etc. ....... Aaaaaaaaaaargh!!!! No! Life is way too short to faff about endlessly gluing pikes to hands. Give me cast-on every time.

Ignore FSN, or Nobby, he is Very Very strange, even when he's taking the frog pills.

Told ya!

I'm just saying the new Napoleonics are very, very good. 

Given a choice, I would prefer open hands and wire.

A very warm welcome to the forum, Arthur.

As one of Pendraken's oft' used sculptors.....

Open handed, against a 'pre-made' pike, halberd....or whatever....often gets mentioned, here. (As 'Nobby'..aka fsn says)...(Not to mention, Mike....aka Ithoriel...ditto)

It would be wonderful if the figures could be made 'either, or'.....But that makes the cost to our esteemed leader (Leon) more than double.....
As far as I can tell....Most ? folk prefer 'ready made' in place 'spears' etc.

From where I sit....I can see the advantages/shortcomings of both.

Cheers - Phil

Welcome, aye, welcome! 

My preference is for cast pikes. My aging eyesight and less than successful record with super glue practically requires it. 

Welcome!  I can live with either, but my one request is that if they are going to be moulded on, then they should be the right size.

I have just binned a load of beautifully cast, but very wobbly, loose 15mm pikes and replaced with steel ones. The figures were cast open-handed and then supplied with soft metal pikes - pointless exercise.

Welcome to the forum. wherever possible I prefer open handed figures, and, in the bigger scales, hands that can be drilled so that steel pikes don't then fall off (Old Glory are good at that). Some companies do provide a choice and I for one don't much care for bendy pikes on the table. Same goes for lances and spears.

While there are sturdiness benefits to wire ones, the extra faff involved in fitting them in large numbers isn't really worth it, though with pikes it probably is a borderline one given the lengths involved. Then again I have big fingers and more likely to stick the wires to my fingers than the small hands of the models so cast on is handy.

Also, welcome to the forum!

Quote from: mollinary on 13 June 2019, 02:39:09 PM
Welcome!  I can live with either, but my one request is that if they are going to be moulded on, then they should be the right size.

This is probably one of the biggest problems, especially at smaller scales

As one of the sculptors.....I could make the shaft/s of the pikes/whatever as thin as you want. (ish)

Once it goes into the mould......The impression of the shaft will be there, in the rubber.....But to try and get the 'hot liquid' metal to go up such a tiny channel is VERY difficult.
My guess is.....Leon/Pendraken would have to spin the mould up to ten times, to just get a single figure that would 'look right'.

Leon THEN has to send these out.

What chance would those have of getting 'home' without being completely  and totally bent ?

That's why I tend to mess about with the length of things....like guns.

It's actually a very difficult process.

Cheers - Phil

Hello Arthur, open hands for me!

http://www.pendrakenforum.co.uk/index.php/topic,18121.0.html

Welcome to the forum, Arthur. You do indeed open with an interesting (and occasionally heated) subject

Quote from: mollinary on 13 June 2019, 02:39:09 PM
Welcome!  I can live with either, but my one request is that if they are going to be moulded on, then they should be the right size.

Best comment I have seen on the subject - ever - and completely agree.
EC1,2 are lovely sculpts, all told I probably have two or three hundred in play. Their pikes, however, would best be characterized as half pikes. The problem is magnified by having one figure carrying the pike at the port which makes it look longer (it actually isn't).

My preference, starting out, was for "molded on" because it is way simpler and I labored under a delusion that it would be easy to cut off and add a longer pike (I was wrong!). Mollinary has actually done this with his, I believe, and bravo.

Molded on pikes of proper length also suffer from the "limp noodle" effect (a counter measure has been suggested elsewhere).

Still and all, my ECW troops have the shorter pike, look uniform and storage is way simpler.

Bill...(d-Guy) HAS hit the nail on the head.

The thinner the 'moulded on' pike gets.....the more 'noodley' it's prone to become.....If poor Leon's casters manage to get decent castings from the mould...... (Then they've got to go in the post !!!!)

Leon's caught between a rock, and a hard place, on this one.

Cheers - Phil

Quote from: d_Guy on 13 June 2019, 03:49:37 PM
Welcome to the forum, Arthur. You do indeed open with an interesting (and occasionally heated) subject

Best comment I have seen on the subject - ever - and completely agree.
EC1,2 are lovely sculpts, all told I probably have two or three hundred in play. Their pikes, however, would best be characterized as half pikes. The problem is magnified by having one figure carrying the pike at the port which makes it look longer (it actually isn't).

My preference, starting out, was for "molded on" because it is way simpler and I labored under a delusion that it would be easy to cut off and add a longer pike (I was wrong!). Mollinary has actually done this with his, I believe

Not true, I am afraid! In all my thousands of ECW figures, the only Pendraken pikemen I field are the Pikemen for my Montrose troops, and they are actually sculpts from the Jacobite range. I was happy to use them, as their pikes are about two and a half times the size of the figure, still a bit short, but it sort of 'looks right', they are nice figures, and you can always use the General Monck 'well they cut off a bit for firewood, didn't they?'argument.   The ECW pikemen have pikes which are barely twice the height of the figure which equates, if one listens t the Dark Lord's very informative conversation with Henry Hyde, to 11ft 6inches.  That is not a pike, it is a spear!  And it looks like it. This is why all my hundreds of pikemen are actually AIM/Minifigs (apart from one battalia which use Lancer figures, with open hands and wire pikes). The AIM pikes have survived over twenty years without becoming noodly, and have managed a number of shows with no irreversible damage. How many have I had to replace? Precisely ..... one!  The point is, it can be done. In fact, if the ECW figures had pikes the length of the Jacobite ones, I would  probably have accepted the compromise.. Sorry for the rant!

Another belief shattered. I'm disappointed, Andrew, I have always had visions of you diligently cutting off the Pendraken pikes and replacing them one by one!
Oh well, life is full of disappointments. 

I have a fair number of AIM/Minifig pikemen among my Irish. To once again prove my role here as village idiot, I cut them down to match the Pendrakens.

Welcome to the forum Arthur1815.

for my $0.02's worth I have gone for a compromise with my Scots ECW project......here's a quick visual comparison.

I used Pendraken EC 2 pikemen with molded pikes for my Irish pike and musket units (I had to cut the pike head off and reglue it with the standard bearers as the 10mm flags I uesd were too long to fit on the existing molded pikes):



Whiile for my Covenant pikes I am using open handed Lancer Miniatures Scots Pikemen with 30mm pins (about 29mm actually since I have to cut the head off the pin)....OK I have used a picture of an Irish shot unit but the standard bearer is a Lancer figure:
 


With open handed pikes you do have to spend a bit of time (and a bit of frustration at times  ) gluing on X number of pikes - I would recommend doing this before painting the figures.

I think its up to individual taste really....."we all got to work it out for ourselves"